1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a moving picture data editing device and device suitably usable for setting and editing a start point and end point of a portion, not to be replayed, of moving picture data stored in a hard disk or digital versatile disk (DVD), for example, and more particularly, to a user interface technique for the edition.
This application claims the priority of the Japanese Patent Application No. 2003-309471 filed on Sep. 2, 2003, the entirety of which is incorporated by reference herein.
2. Description of the Related Art
It has been proposed to designate and edit only a portion, the user wants to replay for viewing and listening, of moving picture data of a broadcast program, for example, recorded and stored once in a hard disk drive or the like (cf. Japanese Published Unexamined Patent Application No. 146336 of 1999).
The above edition is implemented by reading moving picture data once stored in a hard disk drive or the like and reproducing the data in an edit mode, viewing the reproduced picture data, designating a start point and end point of a portion of the picture over which it is desired to skip at the time of replay, adding information on the designated start and end points of the picture portion to the moving picture data, and writing the data back to the hard disk drive.
According to the DVD-Video Recording (DVD-VR) format standard, the information on the start and end points of the picture portion over which it is desired to skip can be recorded as additional data to the moving picture data. It is possible to record a plurality of pairs of a start point (IN point) and end point (OUT point) of the picture portion per content additionally to the moving picture data to be recorded.
Note here that the IN and OUT points are conventionally set as edit points in the edit mode by repeating operation of a play button or search button, pausing operation and operations for setting the IN or OUT point while watching a reproduced picture being displayed on a monitor screen.
With the conventional technique for locating edit points for a desired portion of a moving picture being displayed by pressing a pause button while watching only the monitor screen, it is extremely difficult to set edit points elaborately. That is, to set edit points elaborately with the conventional technique, it is necessary to position desired edit points by repeatedly operating the play button, search button and pause button if the desired portion of the moving picture could not be stopped exactly between the desired edit points set by pressing the pause button. This is very troublesome.
Also, edit points having thus been set cannot actually be any desired ones.